“SIGNIFICANT [YET] OTHER”

Ok, it’s a weird little drawing, silly and trite, even a little like the MAC OS logo, but the shared nose and side of face thing are different enough. Hopefully my Picasso-esque homographery takes it up a notch by blending yet dividing the concepts of “significant” and “other.”

“Significant other” is a term often thought identical to “mate.” But there is a difference, “fair is foul, and foul is fair.” There is the noun “mate” which is a homo-phone (-nym?) for the verb “to mate” which means “to couple” which is, in turn, a homophone for the noun “couple” which means a pair of mated individuals. Most of these terms are about togetherness, oneness and so on. Significant other seems to mean significant yet other, separateness.

The drawing could also be looked at not as two being one, but one being two. two-faced, but not like a Janus, the god of passages who looks to past and future, but as being duplicitous wearing several personae, in turn, as needed. Each mask is significant yet other for one’s self, even before a relationship is an option.

“Double toil and trouble,” significant other persons stirred with significant other personas. This charm is not “firm and good.”

2 thoughts on ““SIGNIFICANT [YET] OTHER””

It is an interesting exercise to dissect the term…kind of set my mind off to search for the point at which I’d put the scalpel…I think you are on to something highlighting “other” as the part of the term that complicates the meaning…